The Functional Brain Connectivity Workshop: report and commentary

This report summarizes the presentations and discussions at a recent workshop entitled 'Functional Brain Connectivity', held in Düsseldorf, Germany. The aims of the workshop were to bring together researchers using different approaches to study connectivity in the brain, to enable them to share conceptual, mathematical and experimental ideas and to develop strategies for future work on functional integration. The main themes that emerged included: (1) the importance of anatomical knowledge in understanding functional interactions the brain; (2) the need to establish common definitions for terms used across disciplines; (3) the need to develop a satisfactory framework for inferring causality from functional imaging and electroencephalographic/magneto-encephalographic data; (4) the importance of analytic tools that capture the dynamics of neural interactions; and (5) the role of experimental paradigms that exploit the functional imaging of perturbations to cortical interactions.